‘Sue’ the T. rex

Does it show that dinosaurs evolved into birds?

On 17 May 2000, an amazingly complete 12.5-metre (41 foot) long skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus
rex was unveiled at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This
huge creature, named ‘Sue’ after Sue Hendrickson who discovered it in
1990, was four metres (13 feet) tall at the hip, weighed seven tonnes, and had teeth
as long as a human forearm.1

It also showed amazing design—CAT scans of its skull show that its senses
were acute. The Jurassic Park scene in which a T. rex failed to
detect a child literally under its nose is mythical. The T. rex could see
and hear well, but its sense of smell was amazing. Their olfactory bulbs2
were the size of a grapefruit, and the bundle of olfactory nerves leading to the
brain was wider than the spinal cord, judging by the size of the skull openings.1National Geographic reported that is was also ‘built to move’,
with ‘12–14 feet per stride’.3

When did Sue live and die?

The report stated that Sue had a broken rib, a left fibula (lower leg bone) deformed
by an infection,3 and teeth marks from other T. rexes.1
The Bible teaches that death and suffering entered the world through the sin of
Adam (Gen.
2:17,
3:20;
Rom. 5:12;
1 Cor. 15:21–22). In particular, death, ‘the last enemy’
(1 Cor.
15:26) could not have been part of God’s ‘very good’ creation
(Gen.
1:31). Sue’s suffering in life and her death reflect a post-Fall,
sin-cursed world. It is just not biblically possible to date her skeleton to millions
of years before Adam sinned.

Evidence of blood cells and hemoglobin found in another T. rex bone supports
the biblical teaching that they could not be millions of years old, because they
would break down after only tens of thousands of years at most.4

The report also stated that Sue was probably ‘washed into this position by
a flood’.1 This is consistent with the detailed description in
Genesis chapters 6–8 of a global Flood in Noah’s time, which destroyed
all land vertebrates and humans not on the Ark. Jesus Himself affirmed the reality
of the Flood and Ark (Luke
17:26–27).

Could dinosaurs have evolved into birds

Readers of Creation magazine should be familiar with many reason why dinosaurs
could not have evolved into birds, and even many evolutionists agree.5
They include:

The bird’s lung has a system of tubes connected to valves and air-sacs, while
reptiles have a a bellows-type arrangement.

The embryonic thumb structure is different in dinosaurs and birds, so one could
not have developed into the other.

Dinosaurs have entirely the wrong anatomy for developing flight, with their large
tails and hindlimbs, and short forelimbs.

Nothing in Genesis says that dinosaurs could not have had feathers, but there is
still no evidence for them.

Even some evolutionists believe that the claimed ’feathered dinosaurs’
were really flightless birds.6

These alleged ‘feathered dinosaurs’are ‘dated’ by evolutionists
at millions of years later than undoubted birds.

Does Sue rescue evolution?

However, not for the first time, headlines have proclaimed that new discoveries
have proven evolution beyond doubt. On Sue, they found two bones that had never
before been found with T. rexes:7

A bone that ‘resembles a furcula, or wishbone’,3 supposedly
unique to birds.

A small ear bone called the stirrup (stapes) that helps transmit sound to the inner
ear. This is usually too delicate to be preserved

However, such similarities (allegedly ‘homologies’) are hardly proof
that meat-eating dinosaurs evolved into birds. There are several points to consider:

None of the above arguments against the dino-to-bird dogma is affected in the slightest.

We should beware of evolutionists’ wishful thinking, where small scraps of
bone are given an evolutionary slant. In Sue, the two shoulder blades seem to be
joined by a very small, slightly curved piece of bone, and this was supposed to
suggest that this was a wishbone like a bird’s. But a bird’s wishbone
is a highly specialised v-shaped bone, and very springy so it can support wing motion.
Sue’s wishbone’ could not function at all like a bird’s real wishbone.

Dinosaurs are very different form living reptiles—in particular, dinosaur
legs were directly under their bodies, instead of being spread sideways. So it’s
not surprising that they had some different bones. The similarities are more likely
the result of a Creator who designed dinosaurs with organs they needed, including
those that resembled other creatures’, and who wanted to leave the message
that there is one designer not many.8

There are many similarities that no evolutionist uses to prove an evolutionary relationship;
they claim that they evolved independently (‘convergent evolution’).
But this shows that creationists can regard similarities as the result of a common
designer. Two examples are:

Many dinosaurs have a hip bone arrangement that is so similar to that of birds that
they are classified in the major group called the ‘bird-hipped dinosaurs’
(ornithischians—Greek ornis/ornitha = bird, ischion
= hip). This includes the horned dinosaurs, duckbills, stegosaurs and armoured dinosaurs.
‘But despite this striking similarity there is no obvious close relationship
between birds and ornithischians.’9 Rather, those evolutionists
who promote the dino-to-bird theory believe that birds evolved from the other major
subgroup, the ‘reptile-hipped dinosaurs’ (saurischians—Greek σαῦροςsauros = lizard/reptile), in particular,
the small carnivorous ones similar to Velociraptor. Thus the evolutionists
believe the bird hip arrangement evolved independently in two different creatures,
but creationists can point to a common designer.

Although evolutionists believe that feathers evolved from scales, the two have very
little in common. Rather, feathers are strikingly similar to hairs in many ways,
including coming from follicles in the skin, while scales are just skin folds.5(b)
In fact, feathers on flightless birds, which merely need to be heat insulators rather
than being amazingly designed aerodynamically, resemble hairs in shape as well.
But since evolutionists don’t (at present) believe birds evolved from mammals,
they believe instead that these hairs and feathers evolved independently.

Related Articles

Further Reading

References

The top T. rex makes her entrance, <http://www.msnbc.com/news/407910.asp?bt=pu&btu=http://www.msnbc.com/m/olk2k/msnbc_o_install.asp>,
May 17, 2000.

Stemlike projections under the front part of the brain that sort the nerve impulses
from the nose and transmit them to the brain for processing. See ‘Sensory
Reception: Smell (Olfactory) Sense’, Britannica 97 CD. Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc. 1997.

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